Black, Radical, Rural

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• Black, Radical, Rural
• Eisa Nefertari Ulen (bio)

Black

Most of the time, my mother had no idea where I was. If you had asked me to tell, back then, when I was five, seven, ten years old, I would have told you: I was in a deep wood. I was ankle-deep in a clear-flowing creek. I was perched, face open to sun slanting into my smiling mouth. I was breathing in pine. I was flying from rock to stone across a muddy bed. I was silent, still, so a butterfly landed in the palm of my hand. I was screaming, racing, so a hive of bees wouldn't reach my shrieking friends and me, so their stingers wouldn't pierce the soil covering our legs, then puncture our skin to give up their lives for the queen, to punish us for poking their buzzing, humming home. I was singing, standing on a shaded lane, waiting for the school bus and looking where the big kids pointed as a flying squirrel soared above our heads.

I was out there.

I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, out in Dauphin County, not far from the dairy farms and the Amish and the Appalachian hills. I was a wild child.

We all were. It was the 70s, and we were free to be, you and me. Mostly.

Meaning, the earth and the farming culture that raised me encouraged me to ascend. I mounted piles of snow plowed by trucks each winter. I clamored atop bales of hay that smelled musty, like the beating earth itself in summer heat. I was a strong Black girl. My own body powered me up, up, and my very spirit soared even higher, like the migrating birds that filled indigo sky each spring and fall above Harrisburg.

But there was so much, out there, ready to tear me down.

My mother loved the country. Born in the Bronx, she lived in New York City until she was around six years old, and my grandmother moved to Philadelphia, the metropolis that powers Pennsylvania. Harrisburg was just a town. There are more strip malls now, but back in the 70s, open fields stretched to the horizon. "God's Country," my mother called it. My father was raised in "The 'Burg," as he called his hometown, and he, ironically, preferred life in the rowhouses that sort of leaned into one another not far from the capitol dome. We lived near Reservoir Park when my parents were still married, and my mother hated the closeness. She had been raised in a stone Georgian off Lincoln Drive, in the tony section of Germantown, Philadelphia, so for her city life was leafy, with mature trees shading single family homes as stately as hers, where Black lawyers, Black doctors, [End Page 108] and their beautiful Black wives lived, nestled in community. Her inclination to country mouse living is just one of the reasons they divorced, and she packed our things to raise me outside the city lines.

Daddy claimed the city as a kind of birthright. Once I was born, our people could say we lived in Harrisburg over four generations, from the year my paternal great grandfather left Philadelphia to establish the family business, Hooper Memorial Funeral Home, on Forster Street. The rowhouse where I lived with my parents at 2021 Briggs Street was more than an homage to Daddy's people. Our home was also an homage to The People. Our folk, Black folk, lived in Harrisburg proper. The Struggle was in Harrisburg proper. While white people, rich, broke, and somewhere in the middle, always lived in Harrisburg, for the most part, our people, Black people didn't—couldn't—live in the surrounding counties. On all sides of Us, everywhere beyond the city lines, dwelled the Them. When my mother boldly left my father and moved us past the Colonial Park Mall, she was crossing a color line few others traversed. She couldn't have known what that decision would mean to me.

When we lived at 2021 Briggs Street, I played jax and jumped rope with the girls down the street and climbed our backyard fence to sing "ABC, 123" with...